This Week in WCIW #45

Welcome to the November 15, 2021 edition of This Week in WCIW, the weekly newsletter from Where Can I Watch – covering the latest news on where TV shows and movies will be available in Canada.

Read on for news about shows like The Freak Brothers and Titans, but first, we once again look at a popular broadcast TV series that no longer seems to be available in Canada.

Missing out in the Viacom streaming shuffle

In our November guide, you may have noticed us referring to SEAL Team moving to Paramount+ beginning with episode 5 of the current fifth season, including in Canada, citing a blog post from a veteran Canadian TV critic.

This past week, reader Doug emailed us alerting us to the fact that turned out not to actually be the case. Indeed, several others made comments on the original post noting the lack of new episodes, and the author has now partially walked back the post as a result, saying he got bad information from Paramount+'s PR team.

Although we've seen some indications that episode 5 was briefly available on Par+ in Canada on the day of release, as of this writing, no season 5 episodes are currently available via the Apple TV Channel version of Paramount+ in Canada, and we assume it's the same for the app version of Par+. (Our November guide has been updated to reflect this.)

We don't know what's going on here, unfortunately. We can only guess that SEAL Team is now in some sort of limbo state similar to season 2 of Evil (another CBS Studios production which aired on CBS and Global but has moved to Paramount+ in the U.S.), which remains nowhere to be seen in Canada more than a month after the season finished airing in the United States.

Meanwhile, this past Thursday, HBO Max in the U.S. released the second season of South Side, a series originally produced for (and still owned by) another ViacomCBS network, Comedy Central. As with The Other Two, the first season of that series aired in Canada on Bell Media channels (in this case Much) and was made available on Crave (the first season of South Side remains there, at least for the moment), but we've seen no indication that the new season will be airing in Canada anytime soon.

The common denominator between these four series seems to be that they're ViacomCBS-owned shows all moving from traditional TV to streaming in the United States. So we can only assume that there's some sort of commonality in the contracts, and/or in how ViacomCBS wants to handle these shows in Canada going forward, that is causing a delay in making new episodes available in Canada.

Unfortunately, beyond that, we don't know enough at this point to be able to confidently say who, or what, is the blocker here.

Programming news

• In somewhat more helpful Paramount+ news: Although Paramount Network aired the premiere of Mayor of Kingstown (the one with Jeremy Renner) last night and will air the second episode this coming Sunday night, the schedule for the following Sunday confirms the channel will not be airing future episodes, at least for the foreseeable future. However, the first two episodes are available on Paramount+ in Canada (at least via Apple TV), and we can only assume that will remain the case.
  
• Crave announced this past week that it would be adding The Freak Brothers, a new adult animated comedy based on a comic book series, starring the voices of Woody Harrelson, John Goodman, Tiffany Haddish and Pete Davidson. The first two episodes were made available yesterday, with future episodes to be released over the next six Sundays. Although available in the U.S. on the free-ad-supported service Tubi (which is available in Canada), the series is distributed by Lionsgate, which evidently decided to sell the series separately in Canada.
   
• On Friday, Disney+ announced a bunch of new shows coming to the service over the next year or so. The only real differences compared to the U.S. are three 20th Century Studios-produced movies that will debut in 2022 on the Star hub internationally (including Canada), but on Hulu stateside: Rosaline ("a fresh comedic twist on Romeo & Juliet"); The Princess ("an irreverent action movie set in a fairy tale world"), and Prey (a new film from the Predator franchise).
   
• Netflix has confirmed that season 3 of Titans, the live-action DC Teen Titans series which released on HBO Max in the U.S. from August to October of this year, will be available in Canada and elsewhere on December 8. (Thanks to reader Tish for pointing this out to us!)
   
• Super Channel is launching yet another docuseries, The Day My Job Killed Me, Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET starting December 1.
   
• HGTV Canada has announced a number of new series, seasons and specials premiering through the end of the year.

Other notes

• If you are interested in trying out Paramount+ in Canada, as of this writing the service is offering 50% off to new subscribers for the first three months (after the seven-day free trial) – yielding an initial price of only $2.99 plus tax per month – at least if you subscribe directly through the service's website. We can't tell how long this offer will be available.
   
• Global claims to be winning the primetime broadcast ratings battle in Canada for the season so far (citing Numeris ratings). CTV will surely have its own view on this, and historically the latter has been even stronger in total-day ratings, but based on our recollection of previous years, this is likely the strongest Global has been in primetime since the early 2000s.

Recent updates on WCIW

We've updated a couple of existing pages regarding items mentioned above, as well as our post about Dopesick pointing to the series' page on Disney+ now that it's been released there for Canadian audiences. We've also added new posts about Yellowstone (on both Paramount Network and Prime Video in Canada) and The Shrink Next Door (new to Apple TV+ globally).

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We'll see you again next week.